Together we fitted the propeller to El Nahla. The little machine stood solidly on her large undercarriage, her black and yellow striped fuselage glittering when we wheeled her into the sunshine. I tightened the last nut. Rose got into the cockpit and started the engine. The Rolls Royce dashboard looked especially elegant in the plane, although we had had to make adjustments to one or two of the instruments. The engine started perfectly and the propeller turned very slowly. Then, inch by quivering inch, my Bee began to move forward. She strained to be free of the ground. She demanded to fly!
Delighted, Rosie switched off the engine, jumped over the side and embraced me. In my soul was a deep sense of fulfilment. I knew that I had created a superb original. I looked at the machine with new eyes and saw my future restored! Once I had demonstrated to El Glaoui that El Nahla could fly, I would be redeemed. He would be apologetic, he would beg me to tell him what he could do to make up for doubting me and I would name my films. He would press them upon me. Thus equipped, I would say my farewells to my business partner and set off for Rome, for fame and fortune! I cursed myself for an idiot. I should never have allowed myself to be panicked by Mr Mix. The Pasha would certainly decide to forget my indiscretions. This was the way of the Oriental court. But when I suggested to Rose von Bek that we now had only to wait to be reinstated in the Pasha’s good offices, she looked at me with such blind animal panic that I was immediately forced to assure her we would leave as soon as possible. I was prepared to make any sacrifice for her, I said. Calming herself, she told me that she appreciated my friendship. There was an instant, as we held hands, of deep platonic comradeship. Around us the great Atlas mountains, cruel and beautiful as Marrakech herself, proud as the Berber clans she sheltered, challenged with their snowy crags the pale blue certainty of the sky.
The emerald palms waved in a faint wind from the south.
In the distant city, the muezzin began his long cry to the glory of God.
I released her hand.
‘Thank you.’ She was almost pathetically sincere.
I have never forgotten that moment.
‘I trust you,’ she said. ‘I have truly found my Lohengrin.’
She hid in the cubicle when my driver returned. She would find her own way home. I was, she reassured me, not to be concerned for her.
When I got back to my quarters I found every door wide open and the servants fled. The place had been stripped. Everything, including all my personal documents and every stick of furniture, was gone. No doubt the Pasha now knew what had happened to his car.
I rushed outside but the driver had already left. I had little choice but to begin the walk back into Marrakech. In his present mood the Pasha would not be reasoned with. My only hope was to reach the mellah and lie low until I could get out to the airfield the next morning. I saw the hand of Brodmann in everything. Surely he must be directing this particular scenario? I began to understand the nature of the Pasha’s games with Miss von Bek and why she was so anxious to escape.
While I hurried along the darkening road towards the city gate, the avenues of palm trees became sinister enemies, threatening a dozen different dangers, and sometimes I broke into a run. When I stopped to catch my breath, I realised my whole body was shaking. Another Westerner, without experience of a tyrant’s omnipotence, might not have begun to know such nervousness until much later. But my experience was already extensive. I could easily imagine what El Glaoui intended for me. I knew what torture could make me do. I remembered how I had longed for death and yet had done anything to remain alive. I was determined not to suffer such humiliation again.
There was still also the possibility that the Pasha was enjoying some complicated practical joke at my expense, teaching me a lesson, perhaps, so that I would be a more loyal servant in future. It was all I could pray for. A miracle might save me, but nothing else. As I slipped through the narrow gate into the medina and began to pad through the dark serpentine streets leading to the mellah I wondered if I were not foolish in seeking out the Jew. Perhaps he was already dead? But I had no other hope. I scuttled like a doomed doodle-bug on a burning log, with every chance of escape an illusion. I could barely think for the tightness in my chest, the churning of my bowels and stomach, the thumping of my unhappy heart. I shall always regret not going straight to the Pasha’s palace and throwing myself on his mercy. I had proof of his trust in me. I could have saved myself the agony of being admitted to the Jew’s house, of being led through corridors and cloisters, across little cobbled streets, through doorways, down steps and into a dank, stinking warren of cubicles, each with a door from behind which came a dreadful, significant silence and I knew as the door closed behind me and the head of Monsieur Josef rose upon the Pasha’s jocular scimitar to confront me face to face that I had allowed myself to run like a panicked dog into El Glaoui’s own dungeons.
‘Good evening, Mr Beters.’
The little man reached past me with the head still on the end of his sword and used it to push open a door. Mr Mix looked out at me and shrugged. ‘He was on to us from the start, I guess. Just characters in his damned melodrama. He’s better at this than we are.’ He used English which was mere babble to the Pasha. Our captor was no more irritated by it than by the chatter of monkeys. He was incapable of the imaginative notion that we could actually be communicating!
The Pasha was chuckling as our jackets were ripped from our bodies. He looked at us with a kind of familiar affection so reminiscent of a lusting lover’s that I began to tremble and knew I must soon lose control of my bowels. I began to plead with him in the name of God to listen to me, to believe that I was his true and loyal servant, that others had encouraged me to betray him. Though a prince in my own country, I had served him loyally and celebrated his glory. My halting Arabic was responded to in haughty childish French. I had dishonoured him in every possible loathsome way. I had lied to him with infinite treachery. Worse - I had posed as a Moslem, when I was in fact a dirty little Jew from Odessa. I found this last the most wounding insult of all. He had made something up from Brodmann’s innuendo. I told him that these things were lies, I was already familiar with them. I knew who had told them to him and why. I mustered my dignity. I said that Brodmann had always been my enemy. He was a known fraud. A Bolshevik agent.
El Glaoui frowned and clapped his hands to silence me. He laughed at me. ‘The famous Russian film star becomes another whining dog of a Jew. Do you subbose I allow Mademoiselle Rosie to have any secrets from me? You will be tortured for a few weeks and then you will be blaced in the basket of your Italian master’s balloon, which will be set on fire just as you are released into the atmosphere. You will be heroes in the Western Bress. Thus all, with God’s help, shall be broberly concluded.’ He spoke with the satisfaction of a theatrical producer putting the finishing touches to his plot. He almost waited for our applause. He told me to join Mr Mix in the cell. ‘I have to go to Tafouelt to deal with some rebels. They are duty. But I will have you taught a few tricks while I am away.’ He clapped again, this time for slaves who appeared carrying first Mr Mix’s heavy Pathé camera and then the bag I had stowed under the seat of my Bee. These were placed at our feet. Now El Glaoui purred. ‘Mademoiselle Rosie left these for you.’ He did not bother to watch as we were chained to the wall, but as an afterthought he had the Jew’s head placed on top of my bag where it stared at me, rather resignedly, until at last it was dragged away by the rats.